Podcast 022 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 022 page.
[Music]
Anne-Marie Concepción: Welcome to InDesign Secrets. I’m Anne-Marie Concepción, and I’m here along with my co-host, David Blatner.
David Blatner: Well, hello there.
Anne-Marie: David and I are the authors of InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs. If you like our podcast you’ll love our book. I’m an Adobe software trainer, design studio owner and I’m also the author of the popular DesignGeek e-zine. David is the author of a bunch of books, including his magnum opus, Real World InDesign CS2, with Olav Kvern, as well as being the editorial director of the InDesign Conference.
David: Indeed. Before we get to the meat of the show today, we want to share a couple of new features of our podcast. We announced these in our blog, but not everyone reads that yet, but we encourage you definitely go and start reading the blog because there are a lot of new information there at InDesignSecrets.com. The first thing is transcripts, which I think is cool; somebody emailed us and said. “It’s all very well and good that you are doing this podcast thing, but it doesn’t help me because I’m deaf.”
Anne-Marie: That’s right. He says he can’t hear a podcast at all, obviously, and he can’t follow a videocast because no one uses subtitles, or even video training — the things you buy on CDs — nobody’s using subtitles. We did a little bit of investigating and we found a service that we are testing out that does literal, word for word transcripts of our podcast. We put up the transcript for the previous podcast — that was episode 21, I believe. It’s linked to in our show notes for podcast 21. You should check it out because it’s funny to hear how we don’t make complete sentence as we talk, but we just left it up there if you want to see — instead of hear — what’s going on in these podcasts. We are going to start doing these on a regular basis.
David: It’s going to take a few days — after each podcast it probably takes several days for the transcripts to come in and get formatted and so on, but hopefully within a week of the show we will have them up there. The other thing that’s a nice bonus about the transcripts is that if you want to go back and look for something we said — honestly, it’s fun listening to the podcast, but it’s a kind of a hassle to go through and try to find a detail weeks from now. So, you’ll be able to go back and search through those; you can just got to the InDesignSecrets.com site and search for a phrase or word and it should show up, even if it’s in the transcript, so that’s kind of cool.
Anne-Marie: And our other new feature is now we have a listener comment line. You can call area code 206-888-INDY — also known as 4639 — and leave a voicemail comment on any podcast. We’ll try to respond to them in the blog or in a podcast, and we might even grab some of your message and include it in a future podcast.
David: That’s right, so if you leave us a message don’t be surprised if you hear your voice suddenly in a future podcast.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Sometimes that’s the easiest way for us to include it, so give us a call at 206-888-INDY — 4639. We’d love to hear from you. That is a toll call, of course, if you are calling from Istanbul or something. It’s not free, unless you’re using something like Skype — actually it still wouldn’t be free if you were using Skype. We like Skype; we use it all the time, but anyway, that’s a topic for another day.
Anne-Marie: We’ll have the number in our show notes as well. If you don’t want your voice heard in front of our millions of listeners you could always mention that during your voicemail.
David: Oh, sure. Yes, of course.
Anne-Marie: We would love to hear from you.
David: Of course, just tell us. Coming up on today’s show — what we are supposed to be talking about today is we are going to be doing some live appearances pretty soon that we want to tell you about in our home towns, and also we wanted to talk about how to maintain text formatting when copying text from other CS2 programs and past it into InDesign. We need to talk about something, which is really a great annoyance in the industry — a great myth called “don’t use spot colors in transparency,” and we are going to try and debunk that myth one and for all. We are going to have the InDesignSecrets Quiz Show contest! We promised it in the last show; we are going to have a contest with a prize! So, listen to that; that should be fun. And the obscure InDesign feature of the week is — wait for it, wait for it — it’s Lab color, what the heck is that?
Anne-Marie: Lab color. Actually, it’s Luminance AB.
David: That’s true. Lab color.
Anne-Marie: Lab color.
David: You’re going to be talking in Chicago coming up pretty soon?
Anne-Marie: Yes, on June 22, which is in a little over a week from now, I’m going to be doing seminars on InDesign for the Chicago Book Clinic. The Chicago Book Clinic is a long time, well established association in the Midwest that encourages excellence in publishing by providing a platform for bladity, blah, blah — their members are book and media publishing professionals from McGraw-Hill and all the other big publishing firms.
David: But anybody can go to that?
Anne-Marie: Yes, anybody can go to that. They have once a year what they call CBC University. A one day, all day seminar where they bring in speakers from different walks of life to talk about things of import to the publishing industry, with a special twist for book publishing. I’m doing two seminars. One is called “Getting Comfortable with Adobe InDesign,” for people who are just about to move into design, or just moved, especially talking about the main differences between InDesign and other page layout programs we all know, like master pages, auto flowing text, moving images around and things like that. Then, the other one —
David: There are other page layout programs?
Anne-Marie: There are a few.
David: Oh.
Anne-Marie: It’s just an hour and twenty minutes, and I’m going to show lots of cool stuff and help people get over the hump of moving to InDesign from another program. The other one is “Advanced Tech — Text Techniques.” I don’t know what’s wrong —
David: [Laughs] You have to go to say it in order to teach it.
Anne-Marie: My brain is moving faster than my mouth today. Anyway, “Advanced Text Techniques;” cool things you can do with type in InDesign, especially the new features in CS2 like new Word file import options. I’m going to jump into that one head-on about how to get the styles working correctly between Word and InDesign; footnotes, custom dictionaries, align to spine — I love that feature, and hardly anybody I know ever uses it — the quick apply window, which I believe 0.5 percent of the population uses.
David: If any of these sound interesting to you out in podcast land — if you want us to be talking about some of these features, feel free to go to the show notes for this podcast. If you just go to InDesignSecrets.com and click on this podcast name — go ahead and leave us a comment like “Hey, you were talking about quick apply; I wish you would talk more about that.” We really use that feedback from you, so feel free to email us with that information. What do you want to hear, not just in those seminars because you might not be anywhere near Chicago, but what you want to hear on the podcast.
Anne-Marie: Definitely.
David: I’m going to be doing a seminar —
Anne-Marie: Wait, wait, wait!
David: There’s more?
Anne-Marie: No, no. Just in case people want to learn more about it, — see the other seminar presenters or sign up — they should go to chicagobookclinic.org.
David: Oh, okay, that’s great. We’ll have links to all of this in the show notes. I’m going to be doing a session July 12, here in Seattle. It’s going to be in downtown Seattle on July 12. It’s going to be a full day, nine to five extravaganza with lots of cool tips and tricks, all the InDesign secrets that we talk about here, but lots, lots more for all day — lots of fun. If you want to know more about that you can go to — I don’t have the link in my head, but you can at least go to moo.com — moo.com is my site and there’s a link in the upper right corner to that as well.
Anne-Marie: Moo.com. You used to be a dairy farmer, I believe.
David: Oh! In my old days in my last life when I was doing dairy farming —
Anne-Marie: Washingtons state’s first Jewish dairy farmer?
David: [Laughs] I can’t even remember the last time I actually touched a cow. Have I ever touched a cow?
Anne-Marie: Oy! You want I should milk you, huh?
David: [Laughs] I just like cows. What can I say? How can you not like a cow?
Anne-Marie: [Laughs] Right.
David: Even better than cows, sea cows are manatees — or dugongs.
Anne-Marie: Yes, manatees.
David: Manatees, are really my — when it comes to cows, that’s really my favorite. So, July 12, me, and June 22, you.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: Come join us; it’ll be lots of fun.
Anne-Marie: So David, you posted this morning on InDesignSecrets.com some interesting little tip — or rant, I don’t know what you’d call it — about copying and pasting text formatting. We already know that you can copy and paste text from one InDesign document to the other and it retains the formatting, of course, but when you copy and paste from illustrator or Photoshop, it doesn’t bring over the format.
David: It doesn’t. This actually came from a reader — listener query — this person was asking about “Why can’t I get the formatting when I copy and paste from Photoshop into InDesign? I was also going to ask the same thing about Illustrator, why can’t I copy from Illustrator into InDesign?” Rick maintained that text formatting is very annoying. Earlier I said that there is a solution — that was just to get you to listen — the real answer is there is no good solution! There is a solution that Steve Werner posted — a fun, tweaky solution — as a comment to my —
Anne-Marie: Oh right, I saw that.
David: But, the real thing to pay attention to is that the Creative Suite is not finished yet. Adobe still has plenty of work to do, and part of the work they have to do is in this copy and paste thing. You simply cannot get formatted text to copy from Photoshop or Illustrator into InDesign. You can, however, copy and paste between Photoshop and illustrator. This has to do with how those programs handle text. Because Illustrator and Photoshop aren’t really designed to handle huge amounts of text — pages and pages of text — they have a very different kind of text engine under the hood than InDesign. Because they have different text engines under the hood, it’s not set up to talk to each other properly. I don’t know — I’m sure Adobe is trying to get this to work, and I’m hoping that that’ll show up in CS3 because it is really annoying that you can’t do this at this point.
The solution that Steve Werner suggested is not going to work for everybody, but it is interesting — simply get a PDF out of Illustrator or Photoshop, save it as a PDF, open that PDF in Acrobat Professional and then export it as an RTF file, and you get the text all formatted in RTF, and then you can place that into InDesign. Not perfect, but maybe it’ll save some people some time. That was clever, thank you Steve. Steve is one of the co-authors of “Real World Creative Suite.” He and Sandy Cohen have spent a huge amount of time thinking about how to move stuff from one program to another.
Anne-Marie: Exactly.
David: So that’s what that’s about. We should also discuss spot colors in transparency.
Anne-Marie: Yes, spot color in transparency. I was doing some training last week and some of the client’s pre-press people came in for the afternoon when I was talking about printing and exporting to PDF from InDesign. These pre-press people were two of the sharpest pre-press people I have ever met, and they were very aware of what happens with InDesign in transparency flattening. They encouraged them to take live transparency PDFs — that’s what they preferred to accept — so, they were great. They were like the kind of printers that any InDesign user would love to have. It was kind of neat, because they were moving to InDesign and were afraid that the printers wouldn’t be able to catch up, but I was like, “Nope, they’re ahead of you!”
One thing that came up during that conversation about transparency flattening — what is that and when can you use it and when you can’t — that was with spot colors — and there is a myth around that I heard during that meeting as well as different places, that transparency works fine in InDesign as long as you keep the text above anything with transparency and that you don’t use spot colors because both of those will mess it up.
David: Those are actually two myths, and both of those, in many ways, are false.
Anne-Marie: Yes. These printers debunked the text one, which I thought was interesting. That’s the first time I heard that, but the printer said that although in the proofs that they do, the text looks kind of fatty when it’s underneath transparency because of how it gets rasterized and then clipped in clipping paths, when it’s output to high res printing, you don’t see that.
David: Yes, the truth is that it depends hugely on the output device — on the type of RIP you have and how they’ve set up that RIP. The same RIP in two different hands can perform very differently.
Anne-Marie: That issue of text with transparency; that’s a different issue than what we want to talk about today. I still say though, to be safe, keep your text above transparency unless your printer insist, “Oh no go ahead.” But the issue is about —
David: I would agree with you, you’re right, but we should talk about spot colors.
Anne-Marie: Yes, let’s talk about spot colors. They said that people assume that spot colors will convert the process. That’s the first thing I hear, like when you put a spot color object underneath a drop shadow, for example, that it’s not going to work. It actually does works fine; you could prove it to yourself by exporting it to PDF and opening it up in Acrobat in version seven — I think in six they have a separations preview too — and you can check it out that there is a spot color plate there, and you can turn off all the other plates and see your spot color in all it’s glory.
But, the crux of that issue is that when you look in separations preview in Acrobat or in InDesign, Overprint Preview automatically gets turned on. It is not turned on by default, so just viewing the onscreen representation is not going to give you a true preview of what’s going to happen. This goes back to the earlier podcast. The one we did last week, David, when I was ranting about why isn’t Overprint Preview always turned on. You should get an accurate preview.
David: You’re right. Overprint preview — anytime you are dealing with spot colors, you really want to start thinking about having Overprint Preview turned on because there are huge differences between when it’s on and off, especially when transparency comes into play. So, if you have transparency on top of a spot color, but especially if you apply some kind of transparency mode to a spot color —
Anne-Marie: Right, a blend mode.
David: Like one of those blend modes in the transparency palette, like darken, lighten, or soft light or something like that, you can use those. A lot of people say. No, never use those! Don’t apply any kind of transparency to a spot color,” and that’s just false. You can do them but you have to be careful.
There are two things you have to be careful of; one is you want to make sure Overprint Preview is turned on, or else you are not going to get an accurate preview onscreen. It will look like there some kind of subtle things going on, but if you turn on Overprint Preview, you realize that InDesign is not subtle at all when it comes to spot colors. It’s either knocking out or overprinting or in some cases it is converting to process — we’ll talk about that in just a second — the important thing is you want to have Overprint Preview turned on or you’re not going to get an accurate preview of your blend modes or transparency at all.
Even then, to be honest, it’s a spot color — it’s probably not going to be that accurate — you’re specifying a metallic silver or something, you’re not going to see metallic silver on your screen. Spot colors are notoriously difficult to preview on screen. You have to take a leap of faith when you are dealing with those, but you are going to get more accurate, at least, somewhat accurate color on screen when you have Overprint Preview turned on, or when you have, as Anne-Marie mentioned, separations preview turned on. So, you open the separations preview palette, you go to the window menu and chose output and select separations preview. In the separations preview palette — when you turn on separations preview — automatically turn on Overprint Preview and that will give you a much more accurate view. Then you can switch through each of those colors to see how it’s really going to affect it.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. The key here is also to talk with your print vendor and make sure that they know about InDesign and transparency, because you might see it perfectly, with separations preview and Overprint Preview turned on, but when they output it, if they have an older RIP or an intern working the switch, and they turn off the option to overprint — some RIPs do that by default and you have to actually turn it on — then the actual output is going to be all messed up because when it’s output to postscript, you have to have the overprint option turned on.
David: Overprinting is a key ingredient in how InDesign handles transparency when it gets flattened, and so, as you’ve pointed out, even when you are viewing something in Acrobat, you want to make sure that overprint is turned on in Acrobat as well, or else you are not going to get an accurate preview there because overprinting is such an important method that InDesign utilizes for — Did I just say utilize? Forgive me, uses for, I hate the word utilize.
Anne-Marie: How about employs?
David: Employs — good, I like that. So, make sure Overprint Preview is turned on.
Anne-Marie: Aren’t there a few blend modes that definitely don’t work with spot colors?
David: Yes. I did mention quickly that sometime InDesign will convert these to process colors. Its not the norm, it’s the exception, but there are a few that it probably will.
Anne-Marie: Those are spelled out in the online help too. They are mentioned there as well.
David: Yes. There are six that I would get nervous about — difference, exclusion, hue, saturation, color, luminosity — basically the last six in the list of blend modes are ones that I would get nervous about. The only ones that I’ve actually seen have that effect recently is difference, exclusion and luminosity. The other ones like hue, saturation or color don’t tend to have any effect, maybe they do in certain situations that I just haven’t seen yet.
Anne-Marie: But, the one that we all use — the one that 90 percent of InDesign users will probably use — is multiply, because you’re putting drop shadows on top of spot colors; that works fine. I have never had a problem with that; never had a client that had a problem with that.
David: Right, so multiply works just fine, and you’re absolutely right, multiply and screen are the two — or just changing the opacity amount, and those work just fine as well. With opacity you get a tint of the spot color, with multiply it basically overprints the spot color, and with screen, it knocks out. So, it’s very simple, it’s not rocket science, it works — don’t be afraid.
Anne-Marie: Just keep Overprint Preview turned on.
David: That’s right, absolutely.
Anne-Marie: All right, so now we have a contest.
David: Yay, contest!
Anne-Marie: We have mentioned in our last podcast that we were going to have a quiz question, and we are going to give a prize to the first person who responds correctly and completely via a comment. Go to InDesignSecrets.com, click on podcast on the left, and you’ll see the show notes for this podcast, which is number 22, and you’ll see a comment link at the bottom of the show notes. Click there, type in your comment — it requires your email address, but it doesn’t get published anywhere — and go ahead and enter the comment. The first person to respond correctly to this question will win a prize. And what do we have for them, Don Pardo?
David: Well, the fabulous prize today is a signed — truly autographed by two authors — version of “InDesign Breakthroughs.” That’s right, our book, “InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs,” from Peachpit Press. We are both going to sign it this time and send it to you. We realize that virtually nobody on the planet has a copy that we both signed, so it’s going to be particular valuable on eBay.
Anne-Marie: Because it’s really hard to find that. That’s right, get a lot of money with both of them. Make sure to mention that in your product description on eBay.
David: Hopefully, you’ll keep this copy of InDesign Breakthroughs. We will send that to the first person who answers this question — Anne-Marie what is the question?
Anne-Marie: The question is — The tools palette lets you do lots of things with single letter keyboard shortcuts, such as V selects the selection tool. In fact, almost every single letter of the American alphabet is used as a single letter keyboard shortcut somewhere in the tools palette except for three letters. What are the three letters that are not used anywhere in the tools palette for a keyboard shortcut?
David: You make a good point; we should specify that this does have to do with the English keyboard. If you are using a Cyrillic keyboard, then all bets are off. We have to limit it somehow to people who are using the American or International English keyboard. Which three letters don’t anything in the tool palette when you just press them with no modifier key or anything, you just press those?
Anne-Marie: Your answer should be just a list of the three letters, that’s all. You might want to mention that this is your answer to the quiz question. Keep an eye on that because we’ll say who the winner is in the comments, and also we’ll probably put it as a separate post on the home page, but we will need to get in contact with you to figure out where to mail the book. All right?
David: Excellent.
Anne-Marie: We’ll announce it in the next podcast, and we’ll talk about it. This should be fun.
David: Okay. We better do — very, very quickly — the obscure InDesign feature of the week — Lab color. Lab color shows up in the colors palette. If you click on the color palette you can choose from the fly-out menu “Lab.” What is Lab color? As Anne-Marie mentioned it’s L A B, it’s a different way of specifying a color. It has to do with luminosity, A channel and B channel.
Anne-Marie: It’s kind of like a neutral way. Isn’t it like the Esperanto of defining of how a color is defined?
David: [Laughs] Yes, I guess so. It’s a way to define the look of a color. What does the color look like, not necessarily how to build a color. So, L A B has to do with how our eyes actually see color. There’s lots more information on this in “Real World Photoshop,” and there’s plenty of other books out there that cover Lab. What’s interesting about Lab, to me, is that they included at all in InDesign.
Anne-Marie: Right, David and I were talking about this. When would you ever use Lab color, because you could also choose it as color mode in new color swatch? Why would you ever do that?
David: I have no idea. Well, here is one reason you might want to use Lab — if you knew that your default document profile, for example, was set to sRGB — by default, most people’s documents are set to sRGB in InDesign CS2 — but they want to specify a color in RGB, but they want it to be a really bright color, really saturated, cool color that may not actually be available in sRGB. sRGB doesn’t specify every color we can see; it’s a small subset of colors we can see. So, the reddest red you can get in sRGB is not the reddest red we can see, and certainly not the reddest red that other programs could spit out.
Let’s say you have got a color in another program — it’s specified in RGB — let’s say 255 red and 0/0 in green and blue — and you want that same color in InDesign. Well, you can create an RGB color in InDesign, which is 255 red and 0/0 green and blue, but it may not be the same red as what you’d get in some other programs. So, instead of speccing it with RGB — which is just an ingredient it doesn’t really say what the color looks like — you could copy the L A B values from that other program into InDesign and use the L A B values, which should give you the same looking color. So, you can actually get very saturated colors — colors that you cannot create in sRGB — in your InDesign documents by speccing them as L A B. Pretty darn obscure, I admit, but that is one thing that you can do by using L A B color.
Anne-Marie: If you’re trying to figure out how L A B works in Photoshop, I think it’s kind of neat that the New Swatch Color dialog box in InDesign, when you choose color mode Lab, it gives you L A B sliders, which gives you a visual representation of how L A B works, which is really hard to tell in Photoshop. We know luminance goes dark to light, that’s pretty clear, but what happening in the A and B channels — what are those about? So, as you drag the sliders around in the new color swatch dialogue box, you can see what happens to the L A B channels. Pretty neat.
David: You can also get that in the color picker, which is one of my least favorite features in InDesign. If you double click on the filler stroke in the tool palette, you get the color picker dialogue box, and as you’re dragging around in there, the sliders and the big square box that gives you all the colors you can pick from change depending on which buttons you click in the dialogue. For example, if you click on the L field in color picker — we are going way out here, way off on tangents here — then you can see the sliders and how luminosity changes depending on what color. So, you can do some clever things there. It’s kind of nice that they include L A B, even though it’s obscure and very few people are going to use it very often. Or, if you use it, let us know. Go to InDesignSecrets.com and leave us a reply. We’d like to hear from you.
Anne-Marie: Wait, wait, wait! Yes, that’s true, but lets not forget about Lab and Pantone colors.
David: Let’s do Lab and Pantone colors next time. We’ll do that; next episode we are going to cover Lab and Pantone colors and that weird setting in Ink Manager that we rushed past before. So yes, let’s cover that next time. If you’re using the Lab in any interesting ways, let us know at InDesignSecrets.com, or email us at info@InDesignSecrets.com.
Anne-Marie: Or call us.
David: Call us, right. What’s that number?
Anne-Marie: That’s 206-888-INDY — INDY, the nickname that Adobe loves to hate — 206- 888-INDY, which is 4639, or visit us at InDesignSecrets.com, or email us at info@InDesignSecrets.com. So, until we meet again, this is Anne-Marie Concepción and —
David: David Blatner for InDesign Secrets.
[Music]
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 022 page.